every winged fowl, &c.), saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth' (Gen. i. 22). Are we then to infer from this that God also revealed a language to animals,1 and invented a dialect for birds and whales, or rather are we to open our purblind eyes to the fact that the letter killeth, and the spirit giveth life?

But, as I have said already, the assertors of revealed language distinctly contradict the very book to which, in their desire to usurp the keys of all knowledge, they groundlessly appeal as a scientific authority. For what does the Jehovist say? 'And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl

1 Cf. Steinthal, Gesch. der Sprachwissenschaft, § 15. Charma, Ess. sur le Langage, p. 247.

2 nito try. In the Arabic version it is wrongly rendered 'to teach,' 'ut ostenderet ei quod vocaret.'- Walton's Polyglot. On the other hand the Chaldee version renders 'man became a living animal,'

If these versions .(לרוח ממללא by a speaking spirit (לְכֶפֶשׁ הַיָא)

were correct, it is obvious that the texts would contradict each other as much as they do in M. Ladevi-Roche's inference from Gen. ii. 19. 'Ce que signifie que l'homme avait été créé pensant et parlant' (p. 9). One of the rabbis explains that was the name thereof,' to mean its name in the thought of God before Adam uttered it. Hamann, Herder's friend, approves this explanation, and illustrates it by 'the Word was God.'John i. I. For a mass of idle learning (?) on the subject of Adam's ovoμoleσía, see Clem. Alex. Strom. i. 335 ; Jos. Antt. 1, 2; Fabricius, Cod. Pseudep. v. 6; Buddæus, Hist. V. T. i. 93; Heidegger, Hist. Patr. i. 148; Witsius, § 3, 162; Carpzov. Apparat. Crit. p. 113; Otho, Lex. Rab. s. v. Adam; Hottinger, Hist. Or. 22, &c. After diligent examination of these passages, and many more on the same topic, I may safely say that more really valuable exegesis may be found in a sentence or two of Steinthal, Urspr. d. Sprache, p. 23; Gesch. d. Sprachwissensch. p. 12, 15.

of the air, and to every beast of the field' (Gen. ii. 19, 20). When we remember the invariable tendency of the Semitic intellect to overlook in every instance all secondary causes, and to attribute every result directly to the agency of superior beings, it is clear that by no possibility could the writer have given more unmistakeable expression to his view that language was the product of the human intelligence, and had no origin more divine than that which is divine in man. Nature with its infinity of sweet and varied sounds was ringing in the ears of primal man. 'Heavens!' exclaims Herder, what a schoolroom of ideas and of speech! Bring no Mercury or Apollo as a Deus ex machina from the clouds to earth. The whole many-sounding godlike nature is man's language-teacher and Muse. She leads all her creatures before him; each carries its name upon its tongue, and declares itself vassal and servant to this veiled yet visible god! It delivers to him its markword into the book of his sovereignty, like a tribute, in order that he may by this name remember it, and in the future use and call it. I ask whether this truth, viz., that the understanding, whereby man is lord of nature, was the source of a living speech which he drew for himself from the sounds of creatures, as tokens whereby to distinguish them—I ask whether this dry truth could in Oriental fashion be more nobly or beautifully expressed than by saying that God led the animals to him to see what he would name them, and the name that he would give them, that should be the name thereof? How, in Oriental poetic fashion, can it be more distinctly stated that man discovered speech for himself out of the tones of living Nature, as a sign of his ruling intelligence? and that is the point which I am proving."1

There are other meanings of the passage in Genesis, full

1 Abhandlung über den Urspr. d. Sprache, p. 77. This is one of the most eloquent and delightful essays ever written. That Herder should have lived to retract it, and retrograde into the orthodox mysticism of

of profundity and moral value. This is not the place to dwell upon them, although they have almost universally been overlooked; but what we may at once conclude from the passage is this—that in this case, as in so many others, those who oppose science and try to sweep back with their petty human schemes of interpretation its mighty advancing tide, are usually as much at variance with the true meaning of Scripture, as they are in direct antagonism to reason and truth. 'The expressions of Moses,' says one 1 whose orthodoxy none will call in question-the late Archbishop Sumner in his 'Records of Creation'-' are evidently adapted to the first and familiar notions derived from the sensible appearances of the earth and heavens; and the absurdity of supposing that the literal interpretation of terms in Scripture ought to interfere with the advancement of philosophical inquiry would have been as generally forgotten as renounced, if the oppressors of Galileo had not found a place in history.'

Hamann is truly astonishing. He gave up his own invincible arguments to acquiesce in an opinion which had been contemptuously rejected by Plato two thousand years before him, and which had even been refuted by a Father of the Church--Gregory of Nyssa-when it had been supported by Eunomius, the Arian Bishop of Cyzicus. 1 Abp. Sumner, Records of Creation, i. 270.

12

CHAPTER II.

THE EXPERIMENT OF PSAMMETICHUS.

Καὶ ἐσίοντι τὰ παιδία ἀμφότερα προσπίπτοντα ΒΕΚΟΣ ἐφώνεον.
Herod. ii. 2.

LET us try for a moment to pass back in imagination to the dawn of humanity. Let us try to conceive-not as an idle exercise of the fancy, but in accordance with inductive observations and psychological facts-the processes by which the earliest human beings were led to invent designations for the immense and varied non-ego of the universe around them.

The analogy between the childhood of our race and the childhood of every human being has been instinctively observed, and has been used for the purpose of linguistic experiments. Whether Frederick II. (of Germany) or James IV. (of Scotland)1 ever shut up children in an island. or elsewhere, with no attendants, or only such as were dumb, may not be certain; but after due deliberation, I strongly incline to accept as a fact the famous story which Herodotus received from the Egyptian priests, that a similar attempt to discover the original language was made by Psammetichus, king of Egypt. I am not aware that a single valid argument has been adduced against its authenticity. Not only does the story carry with it, in its delicious naïveté, the air of

1 See Origin of Lang. p. 9 and p. 14, where I have given some reasons for not rejecting the story about Psammetichus, as is done by Sir G. Wilkinson (Rawlinson's Herod. i. 251) on very insufficient grounds.

truth, but also it is quite certain that a nation, so intoxicated with vanity on the subject of their transcendent age as the Egyptians were, would never have invented a story which unjustly conceded to the Phrygians a precedence in antiquity. Accepting the story, therefore, we disagree from Professor Max Müller' in despising all such experiments, and, on the contrary, regard this fragment of practical philology as one of extreme value, and all the more valuable because, as he justly observes, all such experiments would now be 'impossible, illegal, and unnatural.' For the story, if it be true, establishes three most important conclusions, which are in themselves highly probable-viz., 1. That children would learn for themselves to exercise the faculty of speech; 2. That the first things which the young Egyptian children named were animals; and 3. That they named the goats, the only animals with which, they were familiar, by an onomatopeia; for that Bekos, the word uttered by the children, is simply an imitation of the bleating of goats 2 is evident. It is to us a strong internal evidence of the truthfulness of the story that it furnishes us with conclusions so exactly in accordance with those at which we arrive from a number of quite different data. The radii of inference

1 Lectures, First Series, p. 333. He is so far right that the experiment would be inconclusive; but why? because to make it valuable we should require an indefinite number of children and an indefinite length of time. But our assertion of the human origin and gradual discovery of language rests on quite other grounds.

2 'Bekos' is (if we regard os as a mere Greek termination added by Herodotus) the exact and natural onomatopoeia for the bleat of a goat, as has been noticed by English children; and it is in fact so used in the chorus of more than one popular song, and in the French becqueter. The fact that no suspicion of such an explanation of the sound occurred to Psammetichus, or any of those who heard the story, is an additional confirmation of its truth. It is strange that no Greek was ingenious enough. to hit on this explanation, although they had the onomatopoeias Bhg, Bhoow, Bnxía, &c. Compare the French name for a goat bouc, Germ. boc, Ital. becco, &c.